It had not been in the job description her father had given her, but he had said, sooner or later there would be a situation where, if she had a gun, she would have to use it. There had been a lengthy debate before her father would so much as agree that she should have access to a weapon, for dangerous cases, which, up until now, there hadn’t been any, and provided she had the proper training.
There was, she thought, no ‘proper’ training for shooting people. The best she had done, until confronting that man in the doorway, was shooting at targets at the shooting range.
And it was a moot point whether she was ready for what happened, simply because it happened so fast, and there had been no time for hesitation. Was he going to attack her, or something else?
A thought about how gunslingers in the days of the wild west coped popped into her mind. It was not just having a quick draw, you had to be able to aim at and hit the target. It was not the same, she was already pointing the gun before she ran into him.
She was, she knew, still skirting the real problem. Having to report it, whether it was to her father or the police, it was going to be messy, and she could be in a great deal of trouble.
Was the man OK?
He didn’t look very good when she left him, there was a lot of blood in his midriff section, and he was incapacitated, and in a great deal of pain. The fact she hesitated to call for help until he gave her a name, a name which might be something he made up in the moment, was the action of a moral person.
Still, it didn’t sit right with her, and she knew at some point she was going to have to face up to her conscience.
But, she had since weighed her actions up against the fact he was more than likely part of the organisation that had nearly killed Harry, and in being one of them, didn’t deserve any consideration. She also knew there had been no CCTV in that particular part of the street so neither she nor Corinne would be ‘caught on tape’.
But, that was only that small area. There could be other cameras there, ones she hadn’t seen and she knew the police would acquire feeds from every camera nearby t5o study comings and goings. She could still be identified, and quite possibly Corinne too.
She also decided to discreetly try to find out where the ambulance had taken him, what his condition was, and the interest the police were taking in the event.
She had scoured the morning newspaper which had nothing, the newspaper web sites which were more up to the minute, but they only had a bland paragraph about a shooting at the docks, one saying it was the fourth in that area in six months, and then she had tuned into to the 24 hour news channels, but all that reached the news desk was that there had been what appeared to be a random shooting as a result of a suspected mugging down at the docks, and judging by the dismissive tone of the newsreader, it sounded like it was a common occurrence and hardly newsworthy.
Of course, the police could be deliberately keeping it low key whilst they conducted their investigation.
Then, when her nerves had finally got the better of her she rang her father and made a roundabout reference to a shooting, or what looked like shooting down at the docks, and her interest, when he asked, was that she was driving by and was curious.
She tried very hard to make it sound offhand.
About an hour later her father called her back. There had been a shooting, what the police were treating as a violent mugging. And the victim, a relatively low level criminal by the name of Theo Blines, had died just before the ambulance had reached him. Oddly enough, he said, Blines had been shot twice, once in the stomach and once in the head, at close range.
That news made her blood run cold, and she hung up before her father could start asking difficult questions. She had told him about Harry’s brush with death, and what Harry suspected precipitated the torture, and it wouldn’t take him long to put two and two together.
Someone else had been there, seen both her and, more than likely, Corinne, silenced Blines, and as she suspected, it was anything but a random shooting or mugging.
If only she hadn’t taken the gun with her.
© Charles Heath 2016-2019
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